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Mark Russell

CCTV: murder trio walk into pub after dumping body

Robyn Lindholm, Torsten Travert and John Ryan walk into the Empire State Hotel in Inglewood after dumping the body of Wayne Amey.

A "femme fatale" who warned her former lover she was more than just sex on legs before she had him murdered has been jailed for 25 years.

Supreme Court Justice Lex Lasry on Thursday said former stripper Robyn Lindholm had shown no remorse for the murder of Hawthorn gym owner Wayne Amey in 2013.

Justice Lasry said Lindholm no doubt felt ashamed and embarrassed but he did not believe she genuinely regretted her bizarre actions in the "appalling crime".

Robyn Lindholm was sentenced in the Supreme Court on Thursday. Photo: Simon O'Dwyer

The judge said the murder had occurred amid a background of excessive use of the drug ice by Lindholm and her two accomplices.

This was yet another case to come before the courts involving extremely violent behaviour fuelled by ice, Justice Lasry said when jailing Lindholm for 25 years with a minimum of 21 years.

Speaking about the drug ice in the community, Justice Lasry said: "For years my judicial colleagues and I have watched as this problem has developed to become an almost indispensable feature to some extraordinarily violent criminal behaviour.

Robyn Lindholm was once a student at the elite Kilvington Baptist Girls Grammar in Ormond. Photo: Joe Armao

"This case is but one more example.

"I wonder how strong the will of executive government really is in this area to inhibit and reduce the trade and consumption of this terrible drug."

Lindholm, 42, had pleaded guilty to one count of murder after arranging for Torsten "Toots" Trabert and John Ryan to kill Mr Amey.

Robyn Lindholm thought their relationship was just a fling, but Torsten Trabert fell madly in love with her. Photo: Justin McManus

She had been involved in a property dispute with Mr Amey over a farm they had owned in Bittern, south east of Melbourne, and decided he had to die.

Justice Lasry said Lindholm was angry, vengeful and bitter over the break-up of her relationship with Mr Amey and the loss of the farm, and he became anxious for his own safety.

Lindholm, the former girlfriend of Alphonse Gangitano - the "Black Prince of Lygon Street" - before he was murdered in 1998, had been having an affair with Trabert when she convinced him to kill Mr Amey.

Lindholm began stripping part-time to pay off her mortgage. Photo: Supplied

Chief Crown prosecutor Gavin Silbert, SC, had told the court Lindholm, the prime suspect in the disappearance and alleged murder of another former lover George Teazis in 2005, was a "femme fatale" who used sex to seduce men to do whatever she desired.

Trabert and Ryan blamed each other for murdering Mr Amey, 54, who was attacked in his Hawthorn apartment block's underground car park just after 11.30pm on December 10, 2013, placed in the boot of a car and driven away.

Mr Amey's body was found wedged between boulders on Mount Korong, central Victoria, on December 18.

Police retrieve Wayne Amey's body from its hiding place on Mount Korong in December 2013. Photo: Jim Aldersey

He had suffered four stab wounds to the chest, fractured ribs, multiple lacerations to the head and been choked with a blue rope.

Trabert told police that on the way back to Melbourne after dumping Mr Amey's body, he and Lindholm had sex next to a creek in Gisborne.

Ryan told police Lindholm had been "laughing and carrying [on] like it was nothing" when they were driving to Mount Korong with Mr Amey's body in the back of his ute.

Robyn Lindholm arrives at the Supreme Court for a pre-sentence hearing in September. Photo: Pat Scala

"She's like on top of the world ..." Mr Ryan said.

After dumping the body, Mr Ryan said "it was like, I don't know, they [Lindholm and Trabert] wanted to f...ing party and I just felt ill, ill the whole way."

Following her arrest, Lindholm, who went under the professional name Collette when stripping, claimed that even after they split up for the final time in 2011, Mr Amey "always wanted to have sex with me, regardless".

"It was, like, he was very into that and whenever he got drunk or smashed he used to call me and that was right up until not long ago," she told police.

"We used to do a lot of threesomes and he used to get me to bring girls home a lot."

Detectives investigating the murder found a series of incriminating text messages between Lindholm and Mr Amey in the lead-up to the murder.

One text from Lindholm to Mr Amey said: "I need to feel like I'm more than just sex on legs."

Another text read: "Wayne you wouldn't take me back. I tried for months. After I recognised my mistakes you still rejected me. I was only good enough to f--k. That was all. When I f--ked up I was in a bad place lonely and messed up.

"I know that hurt and I don't know why I did it but the last few months when I begged to come home and I wanted you more than anything you still rejected me continuously. And took everything away.

Robyn Lindholm with George Teazis. He disappeared in 2005 and was believed to have been murdered. Lindholm remains the prime suspect in the case but has never been charged. Photo: Simon O'Dwyer

"I need to feel like I'm more than just sex on legs. There's Robyn here too not just Collette.

"If you make my life any harder than you already have you will regret it Wayne."

At the time of Mr Amey's murder, Lindholm was unemployed, living out of her car, regularly abusing ice and alcohol and in a relationship with Trabert who himself was living rough after breaking up with his wife.

She thought it was just a fling but Trabert fell madly in love with her.

"Her sense of grievance at the situation she found herself in needs to be viewed through that prism," Lindholm's defence lawyer John Kelly told the Supreme Court after she pleaded guilty to murdering Mr Amey.

"She had lost all sense of proportion at that stage," Mr Kelly said.

"But she blamed Mr Amey for the straits she was in because ... she says she had the most wonderful upbringing and childhood she could hope to have."

Lindholm had excelled at school, attending Kilvington Baptist Girls Grammar primary school and then Malvern Girls Secondary college where she completed her VCE in 1990.

She enrolled in a Bachelor of Science degree at Monash University but failed to finish the first year before dropping out and pursuing an animal husbandry course at Box Hill TAFE.

From the age of 15, Lindholm had been a state and national ice skating champion and performed in the Torvill & Dean show on a number of occasions when it was in Australia.

She took up horse riding at 11 and was given her first horse by her father a year later.

Lindholm enjoyed endurance horse riding up until her arrest and bred Arabian horses for more than 20 years. There were eight Arabian horses agisted on the property in Bittern she had bought with Mr Amey before he was killed.

When she was 23 and working for a car dealership as well as the Crown Casino, she bought a 74-acre farm in Glenhope, north of Melbourne.

Hired as a barmaid and then as a hostess in the casino's high rollers' exclusive Mahogany Room, Lindholm met Alex Prelac, owner of the Simply Irresistible Stripping Agency, and agreed to work part-time for the agency to help pay off her mortgage.

The stripping agency was the same agency that exotic dancer Shari Davison had been signed to at the time of her disappearance in 1995.

Lindholm worked initially as a skimpy lingerie waitress and barmaid before stripping.

After breaking up with her latest boyfriend in 1998, she was working full-time as a freelance stripper under the professional name Collette when she met Teazis, a standover man.

The pair began a volatile relationship until Mr Teazis disappeared in 2005. Lindholm remains the prime suspect in the case but has never been charged.

Lindholm claimed she first met Mr Amey in 2003 when stripping at the Central Club hotel in Richmond but their relationship did not begin until late 2005 or early 2006.

They were living together part-time before Mr Amey urged her to sell her Glenhope farm in late 2006 so they could buy a 10-acre farm at Bittern.

Lindholm, who worked on-and-off at Mr Amey's Visions gym after completing a Certificate 3 in fitness training but continued stripping until at least 2010, reluctantly sold her Glenhope farm for $320,000 when hoping for $450,000.

By this stage, Lindholm was aged in her 30s and hoping to settle down, get married and have children with Mr Amey.

But her plans suffered a significant blow when Mr Amey, who had a son from a previous relationship, called her to meet him at Box Hill Hospital where he was having a vasectomy. He claimed their debts were too high and they couldn't afford to have a child.

The couple drifted apart, reconciled, argued, split up again before getting back together, and by 2009 Lindholm was growing more frustrated with the relationship.

She claimed Mr Amey promised that when he turned 50 he would retire and live with her in Bittern but this never happened.

"She anticipated that the pair of them would live out there and she would raise her horses out there and they would see out their twilight years together there," Mr Kelly said.

The pair decided to separate in 2010 but continued to hook up for casual sex.

Lindholm was living alone at Bittern after a brief affair in Christmas 2010 when Mr Amey visited the farm, asked her to marry him and promised to reverse his vasectomy.

Hoping to fall pregnant, Lindholm stopped taking the pill but by mid-2011 they were drifting apart again and Mr Amey stopped visiting her at Bittern.

By September 2011 the relationship was over but they would still meet for sex.

Mr Amey later took out intervention orders against Lindholm and her new boyfriend, Aaron Ardley, and she was forced to leave Bittern in late 2012.

"So as at the start of 2013, her position is she is either sleeping in her car or staying with her parents," Mr Kelly said. "She had been ejected from Bittern, and her 'relationship' with Mr Ardley had turned ugly and violent."

Lindholm eventually moved into a block of flats at Preston where she met Trabert and they had a fling.

"She was a 40-year-old woman with no prospect that she could see, no means of support and no property or assets to her name," Mr Kelly said.

"None of that, of course, ameliorates what then happened to Mr Amey. But that's the setting in which it happened."

A Supreme Court jury found Trabert, 46, and Ryan, 38, guilty of murder in June after a 16-day trial.

Trabert was jailed for 28 years with a minimum of 23 years, and Ryan was jailed for 31 years with a minimum of 26 years.